Soup, that is Delicious

Hi all,

For my first blog post I wanted to share an image (screenshot above) from a book I read for a philosophy course last semester. This image of bowls & cups, as described in Lawrence Shapiro’s 2019 Embodied Cognition (pg 164), is intriguing to me as the shifting ratio of height to width introduces semantic ambiguity in what we are looking at…

I could consume a delicious soup from any one of those 100 round containers – nothing about the nature of those round containers prevents me from consuming the soup. But would I equally enjoy the soup in all 100 containers? I’m not so sure to be honest. Maybe only a subset of these container, when filled with savory soup, yield an experience we might characterize as delicious. Is there something about my experience of consuming soup that is constrained by the semantics imbued in the formal structure of objects in the world? That is a question.

Bonus link to a soup recipe that I think is delicious, click here (for those who do not consume pork sausage, chicken sausage is a viable alternative… For those who do not consume animal products, making it vegetarian is a strong viable alternative!)

Next time I make this soup I’ll be using various sized cups.